In U.S. Pat. No. 3,964,481, the inventor of the present invention has already described an apparatus for injecting vaccine into a chick carried in the hand and making use of a hypodermic syringe.
Further, the present inventor has also invented a method and an apparatus for automatically restraining poultry, said method and apparatus being applied in a preferred embodiment thereof to debeaking said poultry. This prior invention by the present inventor is described in a patent specification published in France under the number FR-A-No. 2 464 700, in Europe under the number EP-A-No. 27064, and in the U.S.A. under the number 4,375,814 and its division 4,446,819.
In addition, the present inventor has also improved this basic invention and has filed corresponding patent applications including a European patent published under the number EP-No. 0 148 692 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,681,565.
The present invention consists in further additional improvements to these prior inventions of the present Applicant for the purposes of simplifying as much as possible the general design of the debeaking assembly, of reducing its number of moving parts, and of improving debeaking accuracy, while allowing various adjustments to be performed in order to adapt to demand.
The practice of cutting and cauterizing the beaks of poultry in order to minimize cannibalism is widespread in the growing poultry industry.
However, beaks must be cut extremely accurately and reliably over time in order to avoid wounding the bird and making it incapable of feeding itself, and also to avoid facilitating infection which nearly always leads to the death of the bird.
The present invention solves these new technical problems by providing a solution which greatly simplifies the structure and the operation of the debeaking assembly while increasing its accuracy and reliability over time, even after it has been operating for several hundreds or thousands of hours, while still enabling adjustments to be performed to facilitate numerous modifications on request while in operation, thereby increasing the versatility of the invention.